Travel With A Difference – 40K Globe

If you fancy yourself as a bit of an entrepreneur but also want to make a difference to developing communities, 40K Globe might be just what you’re looking for.
With programs in India, you learn new skills and use the ones you already have, to work with rural villagers on creating a sustainable solution for improved education and employment opportunities. Become a Glober, and as part of a team with the guidance of a Team Leader, you can make a huge difference to communities with a long-lasting positive impact. To help tell the story of 40K Globe, we speak to Georgia and Jimmy, two people that have done it all…
How did you both get involved with 40K?
Georgia: I found out about 40K through one of my friends who had gone on the program and had become a team leader herself. I was looking for something worthwhile and personable to do with my university holidays. I really liked what she was saying about 40K; how you actually work on a project, it’s something sustainable, and the impact is going to keep helping once I left. I loved the fact that it wasn’t so much a volunteer job; it was more like an internship where you learn so many skills and get to compliment your university degree. Jimmy and I actually studied together at university, and we wanted to find something where we could use our skills that we learnt at university, so we walked straight up to the international office and applied for 40K, got on the program the next week, booked our flights straight after and within 10 days we were booked to go to India – and then we told our parents!
Were you studying in Sydney?
Jimmy: We studied at the University of Technology in Sydney. I was doing Communications and Media Production.
Georgia: And I was studying Communications and Journalism, so we had different majors but were studying the same degree.
How soon after making that decision did you end up out in India and where did you start?
J: After signing up, you go on a two-day induction, and the team leaders that are going on the program basically run you through how it will be on the ground and protocols. After that you head off to India for a month and out to rural Bangalore into villages around there.

How long have you both been out there now?
Both: Four weeks.
G: This is our second trip together.
J: We came out as Globers in July and then headed back home and did the leadership program, and then we trained up and came back in January with our own teams as Team Leaders.
How long are you out there for?
G: Six weeks.
Are the courses running continuously or are there set times of the year for departures?
J: The target demographic is uni students, so it runs during university holidays, so July, December, January and February. There are four programs over the four months, and each program is four weeks.
What are the different projects running at the moment? Are there different areas of skills that people can get involved with?
G: Jimmy and I were working on the marketing. There are different skillsets from journalism to media to filmmaking to social enquiry in international studies, because it’s more like a research theory-based project. The majority of our projects are all product-based, so there’s a lot more business and creativity. We have Banyan Bags – laptop cases; Roka – which is jewellery made out of granite from the quarries and big mines; we have yoga mat bags, incense sticks – the list goes on!

How do people get involved in the business side of things?
G: There’s about 70 students at the moment and about 12 teams, and each team is assigned a product. Some of them are new, like the incense sticks, so they’ve gone in to do all the market research to see if it’s a viable business. Something like Roka, which has been going for nearly two years, will be improved by a new team.
Are the students actually finding people to work on those projects?
J: That’s exactly what they do. For example, with Banyan Bags, they will have gone to local women to see who’s interested in producing them and train them on how to make them. They might get them to make 20 bags, but the eventual aim is to get these businesses off the ground so they run autonomously and on a regular basis.
G: We have our first trial of one team making candles with local village women for other village people, so it’s a business set in India for the Indian market. Now we’re getting the hang of the Australian market, we wanted to test the waters to make the products for the Indian market.

When it comes to visas in India, was it provided for you and do you need a specialist visa to practice journalism in India?
J: We’re not practicing journalism in India, rather, we’re trying to document through a visual medium, how these products are sustainable, how they can be scalable, how they actually help lift and empower these women.
G: We’re working for 40K, as opposed to being an independent journalist writing for an outlet back in Australia.
Are there any restrictions or do you just need to be able to get an Indian tourist visa?
G: Yes, we came over on tourist visas. That’s all that you need because we’re not actually getting paid to be here.
J: We try to move away from the whole volunteering aspect; obviously you have team leaders, but we don’t call the people who are part of the teams “volunteers”, we like to call them “Globers”. When you see normal volunteer programs, people go into orphanages or paint a house or build a well, but that is something that a lot of local people can do on their own, they don’t need us to show them how to paint a house. This is something different; we up-skill them, we give them skills to hold their own and find that it’s a more sustainable model. There’s a famous story about 40K where a team came and built a well in a village and a year later they came back to see how it was going and nobody used the well, the women still walked one-and-a-half kilometres away from the well each day to collect water. When they finally asked the locals why, it was because that was the time that the women used to catch up with each other, it was gossip time. It’s that whole idea of a western lens. We come in with this idea of fixing things, how we think they should be fixed because it’s a different way of life, it’s a different culture.

If someone was thinking about doing this, is there any advice you’d give?
G: I always tell people who I recommend the program to to go in with an open mind. Doing business in India is such a challenging thing, but that’s why we’re here, we’re here for the challenge, so I always tell my Globers “If you can’t change a situation, you can change your attitude”, and that’s such a fantastic thing to live by over here because we joke about living on Indian time and doing business in India, because it’s so haphazard, but that’s the challenge that we’re here for. It’s having that openness and willingness to work and go with the flow.
Do people have to have a degree to do the course?
J: At the moment, we focus on people who are studying or just finished studying. It’s not an age thing – you can be 30 and studying and come on the program – but we want to allow students to develop the skills that they’re learning at university and put them into a challenging, professional context.
Have you been inspired to travel having seen India and lived there for a period of time?
J: We’ve both travelled a lot before, but there’s always a different feeling when you come to a country like India. When you go to a developing country, it can be quite confronting, but a lot of my Globers have this fiery passion to do it again, and quite a few people want to keep travelling and doing this kind of work. They can see results, and when you see results, that’s what gets people motivated.
G: I know when I went on Globe, I started looking at travel through a different lens. I thought, “What’s my purpose to go here?” or “What value is it going to add to me personally?” And coming back home, I was so much more motivated to get into my work and do what I’m passionate about, and I think since Jimmy and I both went on that program, we’ve come out within a couple of months and have grad jobs and are really motivated to work and do something purposeful.
If you want to make a positive change to your life and others, visit www.40kglobe.com